Gamasutra - Features - "Natural Funativity"

As most experienced game developers know, one of the toughest tasks is picking a suitable name, and this theory is no exception. Stealing… that is, borrowing from other sources is one proven method. From Darwin's theory of evolution we have the process of Natural Selection, and by cross-breeding that with Steve Arnold's question of "What is the Funativity Quotient?" we get the name Natural Funativity. But what does it mean? It's easiest to explain by breaking the theory down into three basic areas.

The simplest place to see a connection between our evolutionary heritage and games and entertainment is in the physical arena. Our primary urge is the survival instinct. Anything that directly threatens our survival automatically commands our full attention. It's not surprising that games, and in fact most of entertainment, use themes of survival to similarly capture the attention of players.

The use of this physical realm in entertainment is a clear contributor to the success of movies, books, TV shows, news features, and of course games that focus on the activities of soldiers, violent criminals, police, and others who deal in matters of life and death. Anything that involves threats to survival and the successful (or unsuccessful) attempts to counter those threats is likely to get a large audience. As shown in the parable of Aagh, Bohg and Cragh, it makes perfect sense that we're hard-wired by evolution to enjoy improving our survival skills from the simple logic that early humans who perfected those skills were more likely to survive to become our ancestors in the first place.

Some major factors for survival ability in a hunter-gatherer society were strong muscles and good coordination. This explains why sports are popular within most cultures, and that sports that focus on physical strength and team cooperation (much like ritualized tribal combat or hunting) can be of particular interest to men. Individual sports like jogging, swimming, or cycling are of general interest and all serve to build strength and stamina. In another example of how RSS (Refined Sugar Syndrome) applies to games, the desire to gain skill in quickly escaping possible predators, animal or human, or chasing down prey has become abstracted into high-speed racing not only on foot but on bicycles, motorcycles, cars, sailboats, speedboats, and pretty much any other conveyance. Our ancestors passed on no instinct to lust after 450 cc internal combustion engines - but we did inherit a desire to be able to move faster by any means available. And although cars are much too recent to have affected our genes, our ancestors have been tool users for over a million years, long enough to encourage an appreciation for any good, efficient tool.

In addition to sports that have abstracted some physical skills, the perfection of actual hunting skill is also popular. The computer game Deer Hunter was a surprise hit in 1997, and today some Japanese businessman excuse themselves from meetings when their cell phones tell them they have hooked a virtual fish and need to reel it in. Not all popular games need to focus on complex fantasy or science fiction themes, or cutting-edge 3D graphics if they can tie into this fascination with basic survival, as reality TV shows have also discovered.

But physical fun doesn't just apply to the hunting side of hunter-gatherers. There are a huge number of popular entertainments that involve gathering. Casinos packed with slot machines recreate berry-picking, abstracted and refined into an RSS-related compulsion. People pack their homes with sets of commemorative plates, ceramic ducks, or Beanie Babies. And in video games, ever since Pac Man started gobbling little dots, we've moved on to collecting hearts, coins, and stars, and popular RPG's that encourage players to gather hundreds of items, and of course there is Pokémon's "gotta catch 'em all."

There are other physical activities that tie into our survival instincts. Exploration is a popular component to many games, whether it is the traveler's desire to see exotic places and range far and wide, or a more local exploration, finding the best places to get specific resources, the friendliest shopkeepers, and the safest nooks and crannies. Improving one's knowledge of immediate surroundings is a survival skill co-opted by games genres from RTS to RPG and FPS. And all of these games also tie into another skill that goes back into human prehistory a million years and more - tool use. Many games are directly focused on use of tools, from the craft-oriented play of single- and multi-player roleplaying games to the ubiquitous use of hand weapons in many game types, to abstractions of tool use in simulations of complex machinery like flight simulators, racing games and military vehicle simulations. It can even be argued that all video games that use standard console controllers or PC keyboard and mouse are building our hand/eye coordination and tool use skills. New interface devices are expanding the possibilities even further beyond hand tools. It's interesting to note that so much of Physical Fun is tied in some way to our upright posture that freed the use of hands millions of years ago.

That posture change also made possible a physical activity popular in many human cultures that can be traced back to our distant ancestors: dancing. Even though it took video games many years to go from creating couch potatoes to fostering Dance Dance Revoution dervishes, now the popularity of movement games is assured, and new input devices like the EyeToy seem destined to expand the range even further. These interface devices also make real-world interaction between players at the same console more dynamic, a factor that is very relevant to social survival skills. Surely there are also other unexplored possibilities where other popular entertainment forms will eventually migrate to the video game domain.

Evolution focuses not just on the survival of individuals, but also the issue of reproduction and all the associated matters of meeting and attracting mates. For many years video games had limited opportunity to exploit that dynamic and prowess at games has not exactly been known for attracting mates. But the advent of online multiplayer gaming and the persistent popularity of playing even single-player games in group settings are changing that preconception. Cell phones, instant messaging, and GPS-based games that put people in contact with each other in the real world are likely to further the social aspects of video games.

We are tribal creatures, forming groups and constantly watching and responding to each other. We share these traits with our primate relatives, but we also go a step beyond what chimps and gorillas are capable of. We spend lots of time talking to and about each other. This is a relatively new thing for video games, but there are many non-game forms of entertainment based on various types of social fun. There are social gathering-type activities like shopping, trading collectible items of all sorts, chatting about where to locate bargains, or who throws the best parties, and even just pure social-bonding activities like going to parties or gossiping with friends. The development of language in its spoken form has added levels of indirection to our ability to learn survival skills and key information. We don't have to see something first hand to learn about it, we can hear or read about it. With the innovation of storytelling people learned to spread information that may be many steps removed from the original subject of the story, and the oldest surviving stories and epic poems show that matters of survival and finding and keeping mates have been of great interest for as long as stories have existed. Storytelling was our first type of virtual reality, and is now so much a part of everyday human culture that we take it for granted.

The uniquely human ability to pass on stories and thereby learn important practical, moral, and social lessons has been invaluable to us. Since the more recent developments of drawing and then writing we have been able to experience stories without even having direct access to the original storytellers, and even more recently the printing press and now movies and television have literally let us see someone else's story, and these various forms of storytelling now rank among peoples' favorite forms of entertainment. And remembering the basic premise of Natural Funativity, it's easy to see how these also are ways that we learn how to deal with situations critical to survival, reproduction, and their social equivalents that in human society are often linked to social standing.

Games have harnessed social fun in a variety of ways. Many games have some kind of story or at least characters drawn from stories, starting with early text and graphic adventures, and now showing up in role-playing games and action/adventures like Half-Life and Halo. The rise of multiplayer and then massively multiplayer and persistent world games have made intensely social gaming experiences possible, including virtual communities, tribes, and even real-world marriages and friendships. MMOs like EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, and Dark Age of Camelot and even single player games like The Sims have provided inspiration for storytelling in Internet chat rooms. These social trends are likely to continue as both the aforementioned new hardware like cell phones and GPS systems are increasingly adapted to gaming, and other trends like ubiquitous broadband access, improved AI and voice recognition all make new kinds of social interaction possible.

The Sims in particular bears special consideration here, as it is so intensely based on the opportunity for people to observe and manipulate the basic social, reproductive and survival circumstances common to everyday life. Some of the multiplayer games with the largest audiences are not the expensive MMORPGs, but rather simple Flash versions of card games like Hearts and Poker that serve mostly as an excuse to use text or voice chat between players. Most popular board games have similar social aspects that are at least as important as their tokens and dice.

Even as physical fun is associated with our upright posture and tool use, social fun is associated with another important human advantage, our language ability. But that doesn't quite cover all types of fun. Certainly some of the popular entertainment forms mix physical and social elements freely. Team sports are one clear blend, and people not only participate in sports but also treat them as a social activity by watching them and talking about them. Similarly, people may spend as much or more time talking about shopping and where to get the best goods at the lowest prices as they do actually going out and getting them. The courtship rituals that may include dancing, going to shows and movies and concerts, or going out to dinner all mix physical and social aspects. The MMO games also supply a continuous spectrum of activities blending simulated active physical hunting and gathering, and actual social interaction, grouping, and conversation, as well as objective and subjective social status within the game.

But there are types of fun that don't quite fit the mold. In the games field, one very popular game that seems to have virtually no connection to physical or social fun was the classic Tetris. Tetris was popular with a wide range of ages, and was one of the few games that crossed over the gender gap as well. There is a little physical tool-use related fun in Tetris, but rotating and dropping shapes doesn't account for the hours of play value it provides. The main action does not resemble an aspect of hunting or gathering like so many other popular games, and there is no exploration to speak of, or story. In fact, Tetris is about as story-free as a game can get. And yet it is a perfect way to develop survival skills in one remaining area where humans differentiate from the rest of the animal kingdom. It involves an organ you're busy using right now.

Our large brains are the answer. Even though we use our intelligence with physical and social fun, there is an entire set of entertainment activities including quite a few video games which focuses primarily on mental fun. We practice and improve our mental abilities in our leisure time just as we exercise our muscles and build social relationships. It fits in neatly with our other differentiating features as humans, as our brains are arguably the most important unique feature we have, with more complex structure and (proportional to our body size) much larger than others in the animal kingdom. Our intelligence, hand and tool abilities, and language all complement each other and it is difficult to separate out how they all developed in the historical record. Our larger brains and intelligence certainly made it possible for our ancestors to make and use increasingly more complex and varied tools and carry on more useful conversations. Our tool use and ability to coordinate our hunting and gathering through conversation has obviously helped to make our ancestors more efficient as hunters and gatherers, which in turn let them find enough food to support their large brains (which take a disproportionate share of our food energy). And our language ability has let us pass on knowledge about making tools, and has helped us survive socially and cooperate to compensate for some of the challenges that very large brains have caused, like difficult childbirth and children who remain helpless much longer than other young.

The essence of intelligence is the perception and manipulation of patterns. Tetris excels in letting us exercise this ability. In fact it was the observation of game designer Brian Moriarty (designer of Beyond Zork and Loom) that people love to find patterns in things which led me to this realization. Other games that excel at this range from video games like Bejeweled, through various toys and pastimes like crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, or physical puzzles like Rubic's Cube. Even appreciating music is a form of mental fun, since music is patterned sound just as poetry and song are patterned words. The Natural Funativity theory suggests that these mental games should teach us something that was useful for survival to our cave-dwelling ancestors. Although the literal action of Tetris is at best a severe stretch to link to survival activities, the more abstract function of quickly recognizing - and acting - on patterns is quite useful.

Consider how important it must have been for our ancestors to pick one limping antelope from a herd and follow it by the difference in footprints, or the value in being able to quickly find and grab ripe berries while avoiding thorns, to discern edible mushrooms from poison, or to notice the subtle cues of color and shape that meant a Sabertooth was lurking in the brush. This also helps explain the Natural Funativity value of various hobbies that have little obvious survival value but also involve pattern recognition and appreciation, from stamp and coin collecting to appreciation of all forms of art and music. The survival benefit is not in the actual collecting of coins or CDs, but in the mental fun of recognizing patterns. It is a workout for the brain.

It has been convenient to break down fun into these three categories, although in practice most forms of entertainment combine two or all three in a continuous spectrum. For example, the game of baseball has its obvious physical aspects of throwing, catching, hitting, and running, social aspects of cooperation and competition and the stories of the exploits of individuals and teams, and mental aspects of statistics and rules, as well as the many split-second evaluations and decisions that ballplayers must make in the course of a game. Or, to take a video game example, a MMORPG like EverQuest combines the direct physical aspects of using the keyboard and mouse with the simulated physical aspects of movement and combat in the 3D world, the social aspects of teamwork, conversation, guilds, status, cooperation and competition, and the mental aspects from high-level quests and strategic planning down through individual choices of character advancement to low-level moment-to-moment evaluations of tactics.

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Applying Natural Funativity